Technology Lab —

Hands-on: Firefox Mobile’s new Android tablet interface

The latest Firefox Mobile nightly builds for Android include a new tablet- …

Mozilla's mobile user experience designer, Ian Barlow, revealed some mockups earlier this month of a new Firefox interface intended for tablet devices. The design features a touch-centric layout and visual elements that conform with the "holographic" style of Android 3.0.

The Firefox Mobile developers have already taken the first steps towards implementing the new user interface. It landed this week and is available for testing in the latest Firefox Mobile nightly builds for Android. I installed it on a Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet to see how it compares to previous iterations of the Firefox Mobile user interface.

Although the new user interface is still incomplete and will need further refinement before it is ready for regular end users, it is a promising start and offers a relatively nice browsing experience on an Android tablet. The application has a simple layout: a navigation bar at the top of the screen and a fixed sidebar on the left-hand side that shows a thumbnail for each open tab. The webpage content is loaded in the center of the screen.

The top navigation bar has forward and back buttons, a URL entry field, a stop/refresh button, a bookmark button, and a menu. When you give focus to the URL entry field, the browser will display a drop-down menu that lets you select recent pages, bookmarks, history items, or tabs from another computer. You can switch between these categories by tapping the finger-friendly blocks that appear on the left-hand side of the menu.

As you start to type, the menu will change to provide an AwesomeBar-style autocompletion view. It's quite efficient and comfortable to use on a touchscreen. The performance of the AwesomeBar matching was extremely good during my test, but I'm not sure how it would fare with a more heavily populated Places database (I just started using Firefox on this device, so I'm browsing with a fresh profile).

The tab bar on the left-hand side of the screen mostly works like the equivalent feature in previous iterations of Firefox Mobile. The inactive tab thumbnails are all faded, making it easy to see which tab is active at a glance. There is an "x" icon on each tab that can be used to close it.

When a tab is closed, it gets dropped to the bottom of the screen and shown with a restore overlay icon which you can tap to reopen it. Only the most recently closed tab is displayed in that bottom slot—closed tabs don't stack. This means that if you close two tabs in a row, you will only be able to restore the last one.

At the bottom of the tab bar, there is a plus button that you can press to open a new tab. The URL entry field is focused automatically when you create a new tab, activating the associated drop-down menu. This seems like a good approach and is better than having a conventional desktop-style new tab page.

My biggest frustration with the current implementation of the user interface is that the tab bar is permanently fixed in place and can't be hidden. Unlike the standard Firefox Mobile interface, the new tablet interface doesn't allow the tab sidebar to be swiped off of the screen. This is an issue that will likely be addressed as the new interface matures.

In addition to sporting a relatively native-looking user interface, the nightly build that I tested also offered some cool platform integration features. When you bookmark a page by clicking the star icon, the browser gives you the option of adding a shortcut for the current page to your Android home screen.

The browser also ties into Android's Intent system for sharing content. When you select the Share Page item from the main menu, it will pop up the standard Android sharing prompt which lets you select the third-party application that you want to use to complete the action. I tested this feature with several applications and found that it worked largely as expected. It was able to pass a URL into Evernote, the standard e-mail client, and Read It Later.

The application's performance is good in general. Kinetic scrolling in the main content area is smooth, but the scrolling physics don't seem to quite match that of native Android. Pinch zooming works, though there doesn't appear to be automatic text reflow. Rendering quality is mostly good, but the letter spacing in text is a bit off and doesn't seem entirely consistent. The browser's feature set is the same as what users have come to expect from Firefox Mobile. It supports add-ons and interoperates with Mozilla's Firefox Sync functionality.

There is clearly still some room for improvement, but the nightly build that I tested fared much better than I was expecting—especially considering that it represents a first cut on the new user interface. It looks like Firefox Mobile is on track to be a competitive third-party browsing option on Android tablets.